In the last entry I wrote, with some satisfaction, that I had finally put everything the house depends on into one room: the Mac mini, the new router and the Hue bridge, all together in the guest bedroom, one set of cables, one place to look when something is wrong. I published that on Tuesday. On Wednesday somebody staying in that room unplugged it.
Not maliciously. Not even carelessly. There was a socket, they needed the socket, and nothing about the arrangement said otherwise, because I had not put a label on anything or thought for even one second about the fact that the room I had chosen is the room I lend to other people. It is the only room in this place that regularly contains someone who has no idea what any of it does.
The part I could not have predicted, and enjoyed anyway
Power came back, everything booted, and then I went to the router's logs to work out exactly when the outage had started and how long it lasted. The logs told me it started at a time that made no sense at all.
This router has no battery-backed clock. Nothing cheap does. When it loses power it comes up with no idea what time it is, and it stays that way until it can reach a time server and ask. What it does in the meantime is not blank the timestamps, which would at least be honest, but stamp them from the last moment it knew about, which is the moment the power died. So the entire boot sequence, every line of it, is confidently labelled with a time from before the outage started.
Read quickly, the log says the router booted slightly before it lost power. I stared at that for a while. It is not a bug, it is the only sensible thing a device with no clock can do, and it means the first several seconds of every log after a power cut are a small work of fiction that then silently corrects itself once the network comes up. I have written the signature down so that next time I recognise it in ten seconds rather than ten minutes.
What I have not decided yet
The obvious answer is a label on the plug, and a label is not a solution. A label works on somebody who is already looking for a reason not to unplug something. It does nothing for somebody who is charging a phone in the room they are sleeping in.
The real answer is probably that the guest bedroom was a bad choice, and that I made it for the worst possible reason, which is that it was the room I happened to be standing in with an armful of equipment. Everything I actually wanted out of the consolidation, one place and one set of cables, is just as true of a room nobody sleeps in. So it likely moves again, which is annoying enough that I have not done it yet, and I would like to pick the spot on purpose this time rather than arrive at it.
There is a wider point here that I keep circling and have not really internalised. I have spent a month making this house resilient to software failures, and I am quite good at that now. Every genuinely disruptive thing that has happened to it has been physical. A breaker I threw myself. A cable in the wrong port after the router swap. A socket somebody needed. None of my monitoring watches for a person, and a person is the most common failure mode in the building.